My life right now is hard in different ways from before, but it's also joyful in the same ways, and peaceful in about equal measure. I like who I am. I like the people I surround myself with for the most part. Onward!

Up since 4 for no good reason. Enjoying the quiet of a solitary Sunday. These are the times when I want to catch up with my peeps, so I've read your posts (haven't commented much, but I'm listening. Lisa, I love how you notice things about all your kids).

I've been spending a lot of time on SparkPeople lately, working on my food/exercise program (a.k.a. diet, but not for weight-loss, because ew). It's working (i.e., my blood is no longer testing as prediabetic, and I'm reducing my heart meds a little at a time with doctor supervision), so it benefits me to make it as fun as possible, which means a fair bit of online socializing, which is the bulk of my social life and has been for, wow, almost 18 years now (I got online in mid-1998).

Wiscon folks are being chatty on Twitter and it sounds really great, but considering who my friends are, it makes me wonder how things are in the background and how my friends who aren't going any more are feeling today. I want to hug you all.

Work is decent. Without the old boss, things are much calmer in my area, except when I stick my foot in my mouth and cause myself anxiety, but usually, things are good. I'm really good at working. That's something I don't always give myself credit for. I kind of suck at the social end of it, but the customer service part, I rock at, and the paperwork part is my STAR THING.

Mom is still dealing with major major pain issues and there's not much that can be done for a variety of reasons, so we (meaning she, I, James) try to keep her distracted and happy as much as possible. I foresee a time not too long from now when she'll decide it's not worth it any more. I will cope with that as best I can if/when it comes. This paragraph doesn't lend itself to language. There is much unsaid.

I haven't been writing. I'm not sure why. When there's time, I play my game or hang out online, and I just have no desire to write. I don't even really feel bad about it, though I do seem to be happier when I'm producing at least poems. But lately, just can't be arsed.

Enjoying (if that is the right word) Top of the Lake, but I love Elizabeth Moss and the kind of gritty police drama it's shaping up to be (I'm on the second episode), so it is a natural for me.

James is still obsessed with home shows, and that led to his new obsession, our house. It was apparently built by an artist/architect who turns out to be kind of interesting, and the house itself was a marvel when he built it in 1948/9, so James has become Mr. Research Man, constantly finding new bits of information about the guy. If you're awesome at finding out stuff about dead people and want to join the puzzle, let me know and I'll shoot you the guy's name. Since he got a lot of press that included our address, I don't want to just say it here.

The kid finished her first semester of college!! She thinks she got mostly As and a B. Either way, she finished!! It's not something she loves, but she chose to do it, and she finished. Super proud!

Dad and I are still working on teachelectronics.com, and he retired yesterday from his in-person teaching job (he still teaches a bunch of online classes), so he'll have more time for it soon. And I'll have Fridays off starting next week, so we're going to work on it together. If you want to learn college-level electronics online for cheap, let me know and I'll hook you up with some free coupons for his courses.

Hm, what else. Sister is still in jail. Nephew is still lackadaisically looking for work and living off his dad and my mom. I still miss the Bay Area and my peeps there (especially Guy, of course). I'm reading a little, cooking a little, staring into space a lot. My pain and dizziness are bad enough to make me tired and sad, but not any worse than that. I get a lot of joy out of little things, and my entire life feels like it's in a holding pattern while we live this stage of our life as well and as usefully as we know how.

Oh, and Black Twitter is still one of my most favorite things in all the world. And Captain Awkward. And YoIsThisRacist. And my game (Two Dots).

Was just reading a nice update post from a friend I see a lot of online, and it was really good to hear the details of what she's been up to. That made me want to give an update, too. I will put it under cut tags, because I'm feeling chatty.

Awoke at 4 to a random sound that my brain processed as something hitting the house. It was probably just someone closing a door in the house somewhere -- it's a big house. I also had the beginnings of a migraine, so it could've been exploding head syndrome, which I do get sometimes, and which is one of the coolest-named benign pschophysiological things ever (if you know of others, tell me -- cool names for shit are my lifeblood).

Anyway. Four in the morning.

Because of the impending migraine, I took aspirin and caffeine, and if I go back to sleep, I will doom myself to a full-blown migraine, so instead I have turned down the brightness on my monitor and settled in with DW/LJ and my "Right-hand Man" earworm to do a nice long update, which I haven't done in some time, and which will be under a series of cuts.

Good, if unproductive weekend. Came home from work on Friday in a foul temper (I assume from relief at the end of both my own school quarter and our students' semester, which was especially hard for me this time around because I was finding people scribes for their finals. I think I just had a mini-meltdown from its being finally over), and it took me until yesterday morning to feel vaguely like myself again.

This week, I have to work Monday/Wednesday/Friday, but my boss is not here and my file clerk is, so I think I'll be able to get lots of work done. I hope so! It would be awesome to be able to greet my boss next month with the files in order; they've gotten so bad with all the work turmoil.

Got to go to Costco with wild_irises yesterday, which was fun, and have spent some time cooking and cleaning and exercising, but lots more time staring into space and playing computer games than usual. Which, of course, is okay. If my dad gets here on Saturday morning and my house is a wreck, hell, he lived with me for 14 years; it will not be news to him.

We are liking the Bowflex. It's easy to use and was fairly easy to put together. It takes up a HUGE amount of space, so it's good that we have a big living room and no sofa.

sogwife has to have surgery this week (I don't feel okay talking about the details; that's her story, but my story is...) and I'm worried for her, but also glad she's able to have it done. I wish I had the wherewithal to go up and hold her hand and stuff, but honestly, I'm standing

righthere

and the end of my rope is

rightoverthere

My dad and stepmom will only be here for one day, the 24th -- they leave the morning of the 25th -- and then when they're gone, I have one week off from EVERYTHING: school, work, and obligations. I will be broke, but that's okay. I will be in my house, with my family, recovering. I can hold out for one week until that happens. Pretty sure. Probably.

The kid's grades come out on January 3rd, according to her school's website. I'm actually kind of glad I don't have to deal with that conversation until after Christmas and her birthday. I'm not feeling anxious about it, but I still don't think it'll be easy. Unless somehow I'm completely wrong and she didn't actually drop out of school without telling me. Again. I mean, there are people who manage to get good grades without going to class, right?

This ramble will be less verbose than usual, and mostly unedited, because I'm sitting with my feet up, using James's iPad, so typing's a pain in the ass.

Woke at 6 this morning and didn't bother trying to go back to sleep, because this quiet, alone time is my favorite. This weekend is the Big Cook, so I have a lot to do, but the whole weekend to do it in.

Got my prize money. Bought lots of groceries, schoolbooks, and a home gym, along with putting some in savings. James and I have been exercising up a storm, and I've had normal blood pressure for 13 days straight! When we moved up here, he left his exercise machine behind, and we've been wanting one since, so when I saw one for half price with free shipping, I went for it.

Did I mention my mom's Thanksgiving visit went very well? We only got in one real argument. A pretty bad one, but we recovered quickly.

It's my belief that the kid stopped going to school a while ago and has been pretending she's going. If this is the case, we'll be asking her to move out 30 days after grades come out on January 3rd. This is sad for me, but it's okay. She's 20 and we do her no good if we enable her to go through life doing absolutely nothing besides playing her game and sleeping. We gave her someplace safe and calm to be when she needed it, and we made it clear that going to school or working was her end of the deal.

And speaking of school, my first quarter is over, yay! My grades are excellent, I have a month off, and I went around all happy and bouncy with relief yesterday. No homework for a month!

I've been reading your journals and rarely commenting. Please forgive me. I look forward to engaging more from now until mid-January when school starts back up.

Reposted from my Google+, because it's as good an update as any today:

When I was a kid, I was really good at slacking. I could sleep for 16 hours at a stretch. I could watch TV from when the Cosby show came on (shut up!) until Bob Costas was finished. I did homework only when I felt like it, and my grades showed it.

I'm not good at it any more. I don't know when that happened, exactly. I just caught myself in an internal dialogue that went something like this:

Me: Okay, we're doing laundry today, so I should collect that up, and then maybe I can finish planning the menus for the big cooking day, and there's a sink full of dishes, and now that I've got the bookcases culled, I can put any spare books into that, and...

Me: Wait. It's Sunday. Can't you just go about your day and do what you feel like doing? The laundry will get done; you and James have a laundry date. Everything else? It's SUNDAY. You're SICK. Take a break, or do stuff because you feel like it. You do NOT have to schedule every hour of your Sunday. CHILL THE FUCK OUT.

Hi, all. I've been reading, but rarely commenting except to say "Yay!" or "Oh, no!" to your posts. This is one of those long, laundry-list updates that I like to let you opt into, so it's going behind cuts.

Other stuff: Work is fine, though still backed up, and I've got extra hours for a while, so my paychecks'll be a little bigger, so that's nice.

The kid has a kidney infection. She's taking antibiotics, but they may be the wrong ones.

I had a pharmaceutical screwup that was compounded by not having any of my docs in town when I needed them, so it'll be a week or so before I feel like I'm really awake and alive again, now that I have my prescription. And I don't wanna say why in public, but mactavish and loracs were the heroes of the revolution on this one.

Mom is okay, but really tired.

My blog is still making me happy, as are my family.

And I'm home. Home home home home HOME. I have the day off tomorrow, and if I didn't HAVE to, I wouldn't leave the house. (I do have to, though, to pick up my prescription and submit to a bunch of tests. *sigh*)

1) Slept until something like 4pm yesterday; the only time I can sleep that long is when I'm sick, so I'm glad I pretty much slept through it. Today was spent sitting in one place almost the whole day (with brief forays into the kitchen to put away dishes; james_huber won't let me wash them because it eats up my hands), writing FIVE blog posts and fixing some of the static pages on the blog. Maybe now I'll work on some of the design stuff; I suck at design stuff, but I can't afford a designer, so I'll see what I can do.

2) I can hear the kid in her room, singing in Japanese to her WoW friends. Singing really prettily. I haven't heard her sing since she was a small child, and this is kind of choking me up.

3) Famous people (at least people famous in the circles I run in) talk to me on Twitter, and it's kinda fun to be part of their day. I wasn't expecting that to be anything I gave a rat's ass about.

4) Keep feeling like I don't know how to maneuver socially at work. Have decided to just let it be. They like my work and my work ethic; they'll have to just put up with my weirdness.

5) I don't buy new books very often, but I bought Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table for French Fridays with Dorie, and it's really beautiful, and so far, very good. I'm only a chapter in yet, though. (The gougeres turned out really well.)

I'd say that'll teach me not to stay up too late, but it probably won't.

We got home from Sedaris around 11 (we walked home -- it was chilly but nice out, and it's only two miles), and 6am came early. Plus, the weather shifted, and it's wintry outside, so something inside my body is begging me to let it curl up under a blanket and sleep just a few hours. It's a long day today (work, volunteer job, social engagement tonight), but I think I should schedule a nap for tomorrow. :-)

Decided at the last minute (with the aid of the rain and a not-feeling-very-good teenager) to skip my planned trip to San Leandro and environs. Spent most of the day in my chair, but I did get the following things done.

1) I'm enjoying having the Munchkin here. She a good source of affection for me, and I do like her a lot. Also, she's not surly or uncooperative, the way I know teenagers can be. She sometimes has to remind me not to treat her like a younger child, but she's very good-natured about it, and she really is willing to give respect, not just demand it. Also, while I really wish we had a separate room for her, she's taken the whole living-on-our-couch thing in stride. (And she still wants her aunt to tuck her in from time to time, which makes me very happy. I love this kid a lot.) I do wish things had gone better for her at her previous home, but I'm so glad I'm able to offer her someplace stable and full of love.

2) Still addicted to WordTwist. Spending way too much time on the game.

3) Really liking Ubuntu. Sure enough of its relative permanence in my life that I'm ripping all my CDs to that partition, and looking for an invoice software that will run on Linux so that my last ties to Windows will be gone.

4) Just in case I haven't made it abundantly clear, someotherguy didn't have to agree to have a teenager invade his home for the long (or even medium) haul. The fact that he agreed with me that it was the right thing to do makes me love him even more. In fact, the same can be said of stonebender and sogwife and loracs -- when they heard what the situation was, they all said some variation of "Yep, gotta do what we gotta do -- how can I help?" My family is the bestest family I could ever have imagined.

1) I am breaking nooks's rule for a second to say "I haven't been not-blogging because nothing is going on, or because things are going on, or because things are rough or easy or happy or sad -- just because I haven't felt like it."

2) Had the heart scan thingy. It was interesting, and I may make a post about it later. I have a medical appointment on the 29th to talk about it.

3) The visit to mom's was better than last time. LOTS. First of all, my mom is doing well, and wasn't in the hospital. Second, the sibling I can't seem to get along with made herself scarce. Third, I saw most of my beloved relatives. Fourth, there was real Mexican food. Lots of it.

4) I will have exciting news in a day or two. Sharpen your pencils, writers and artists!